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Show WHOSE PUBLIC LANDS? 11 trudes in such a variety of shapes; involving so deeply the feelings and interests of a large portion of the Union; insinuating itself into almost every question of public policy, and tinging the whole course of our legislation cannot be put aside or laid asleep.22 Hayne compared the United States policy of exacting a high price for its lands with that of other countries, which he was convinced had given lands away for a slight payment or rent, and with the free grant policy of the American Colonies. He pointed to the great burden of farmers' debt for which the policy was responsible. He disliked the use of the public lands as a national treasure, which he felt was corrupting. He scored the policy of limiting sales in the West in order to retain labor in the industrial centers of the East, and the policy advocated by some of distributing the income from land sales among the states. He deplored the demands of the western states for grants for various purposes, and suggested that the best solution of the public land question was to relinquish the lands to the states for a price that would recover the cost of surveying and preparing them for market. To Hayne's charges that New England had been averse to land legislation looking toward the construction of internal improvements and facilitating the growth of the West, Webster's reply was not altogether effective, nor indeed correct, nor did it dispel the view that the northeastern states had watched with alarm the admission of the new western states. It was, however, a magnificent defense of a broad interpretation of the Constitution; it repudiated the Hayne view that the public lands in the hands of the Federal government and the income derived from them were a corrupting influence; and it presented a clear statement of the nationalizing influence of the public lands. Webster glossed over his section's past parochialism, and indeed his own, and argued for the close economic ties with the new West in which he KIbid. Jan. 19, 1830, p. 32. personally and his constituents were to invest great sums of money.23 The Webster-Hayne debate was conducted under the eye of that master theorist on the sovereignty of the states and the limited power of the Federal government-John C. Calhoun-who, as Vice President, was forced to listen and not trumpet forth his views. It took up much of the Senate's time from December 1829 until May 1830 when, on motion of Samuel Bell of New Hampshire, the Foote Resolution was tabled. During this excited debate the western grievances concerning the public lands, which Benton had brought to the fore and Hayne had amplified, were permitted to slip into the background in favor of concentration upon the nature of the Government of the United States. Henry Clay's Distribution Bill The public debt rose to its highest point in 1815. Thereafter it declined slowly until 1830 when a series of annual surpluses wiped it out completely and left a large surplus in the Treasury. Among the options available to Congress, or at least pressed upon it, in this unusual and rather pleasant period of substantial surpluses from 1825 through 1836, were: (1) preemption that would curb competitive bidding for land; (2) reduction or graduation of the price of land or free grants to settlers; (3) cession of the public lands to the states; (4) reduction in the tariff which until 1836 was bringing in the larger part of the government's income; (5) lavish expenditures on internal improvements; or (6) distribution of the net returns from the public lands to the states or deposit of the surplus revenue in the Treasury to the credit of states on the basis of their representation in the Congress. Henry Clay and most Whigs opposed the first four options or any combination of them. 23 Webster could not have been ignorant of the huge land sales of 1815-19 which reached 5,475,648 acres in the latter year and yet in his reply to Hayne he declared the sales had never been over a million acres. |
